I used to think falling in love at work was something that happened to people with messy calendars and no sense of self-preservation. I was thirty-two, living in a small flat near Portobello, making a decent living in a marketing agency off Pearse Street, and very proud of the fact that I kept my feelings tidy. My boss, Ciarán, was the sort of man who made that difficult without ever trying. He remembered how people took their coffee, apologised when he interrupted, and once walked twenty minutes in the rain to bring a junior designer her laptop charger because she was too embarrassed to ask a client to wait.
Still, I told myself admiration was not attraction. He was my manager. I was sensible. Then we were sent to Belfast for a two-day pitch with a hotel group, and all my careful little rules began to come apart somewhere between Connolly Station and the first cup of train coffee. We sat across from each other with our laptops open, pretending to work, while the grey morning slid past the window. He asked me about growing up in Dublin, about my mother’s shop in Crumlin, about why I never spoke in meetings until the last ten minutes and then said the thing everyone remembered. No one at work had noticed that before. Or maybe no one had said it kindly.
The pitch was in a polished boardroom near Belfast City Hall. I remember the smell of expensive carpet, the click of my own pen, the small panic before I had to present our campaign idea. Halfway through, a man on the client side challenged the whole strategy, and for a second I froze. Ciarán didn’t rescue me. He just looked over, calm as anything, and said, “Aoife knows this better than anyone.” It was trust, not pressure. I answered. I was clear, maybe even brilliant for five minutes. When we got the account, everyone shook hands, and Ciarán grinned at me like I had scored the winning point in Croke Park.
That evening, the Belfast rain came down with theatrical commitment. Our train back was cancelled after a signal fault, then another delay, then the sort of announcement that makes a station full of adults sigh like schoolchildren. The company booked us separate rooms near the Cathedral Quarter. We went for dinner because there was nothing else to do and because winning made us light-headed. In a little restaurant with steamed-up windows, he told me about his father dying when he was twenty-four, about taking jobs too seriously because grief had made him terrified of wasting time. I told him about my last relationship, the one that ended quietly over plates in a flat in Rathmines, both of us too tired to fight for it.
There was no grand confession. That would make it sound cleaner than it was. We walked back past wet cobblestones and glowing pub windows, and under the awning of the hotel he brushed rain from my sleeve. Such a small thing. Barely a touch. But I felt it all through me. He stepped back first. “I’m your boss,” he said, not as a warning to me but to himself. I laughed because I was nervous and said, “I know. It’s very inconvenient.” Then we stood there, two grown people with overnight bags and sensible shoes, looking at each other like teenagers.
Nothing happened that night. That matters to me. We said goodnight and went to our separate rooms. I lay awake until nearly three, listening to the lift doors open and close down the corridor, thinking about how desire can be easy but decency is the thing that tells you whether it is love. In the morning, over burnt hotel toast, we agreed not to pretend it was nothing. We also agreed that we could not carry it back into the office as it was. On the train home, somewhere past Drogheda, we made a plan that felt more like an act of respect than romance. He would speak to HR first. I would request a move to a different
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